EDIT: I made it as big as a screenshot would let me. I also changed up the pictures/steps a bit.

Sorry it's kinda small, hopefully you can still see everything. This was done mostly in Paint Tool Sai. The finishing touches (as can be seen on the final picture but not on here, were done in Photoshop).

1) Sketch with basic shapes for bodies. Just laying out composition. Different colors help make the sketch look prettier (which is motivation for me to draw). Basic shapes help to better define anatomy then going right in and drawing.2) More detailed sketch, filling in the muscles and clothing. Lots of google referencing here for the clothing.3) Inked with dark reddish brown and 3px brush. The original image is 8.5x11in at 300 dpi, for comparison to the size of the brush. Actually, I think a 1px brush would have been better here. I did use that for the faces.4) Filled in base colors.5) Used a soft airbrush get some big gradients (see Homura's hair and Madoka's shoes).6) Started shading on skin and Homura's hair. Shading was done with brush tool with opacity and color blending set on low and persistence set on medium. I wanted it like cell shading but softer.7) Finished shading. Tweaked colors in overlay layer with big, soft airbrush.8) Drew background and added details.9) Went into Photoshop to add textures and tweeked colors (not shown here but end results can be seen in final image, which is linked at the top of the description).

Thank you! I'm glad you found it useful. I can also answer any specific questions you have about the process. This style is more popular on pixiv than it is on dA, so you can check out that site for more inspiration

Hmm. Can't see why! I really like this style! It's really clean and pretty!But thanks a lot! I just need to work on my shadow placement and making my lines thin. For some reason I have a bad habit of making HUGE lines...

Haha, for thin lines, I found the best way is to draw large. Yea. It was a bit intimidating for me at first because I was like "THE LINES HAVE TO BE PERFECT. IT'S SO HARD TO GET THEM PERFECT WHEN I'M DRAWING THIS LARGE."

DPI doesn't really matter for my purposes because I print at around 300. I usually do 8.5 by 11 inches, but it feels like you are drawing large enough. I guess it's just the brush size then? I would have liked to use 0.8 px for the entire Madoka drawing, but I only used that for the face. The rest was 3px

I'm sorry! I reread your comment and understood what you meant by the fullview size setting. i was not aware such an option is available >___< I've increased it so I think you can see it fairly well now